TITLE: A First Day Back Programming in Joy AUTHOR: Eugene Wallingford DATE: July 16, 2016 2:52 PM DESC: ----- BODY: I learned about the programming language Joy in the early 2000s, when I was on sabbatical familiarizing myself with functional programming. It drew me quickly into its web. Joy is a different sort of functional language, one in which function composition replaces function application as the primary focus. At that time, I wrote a bunch of small Joy programs and implemented a simple interpreter in PLT Scheme. After my sabbatical, though, I got pulled in a lot of different directions and lost touch with Joy. I saw it only every two or three semesters when I included it in my Programming Languages course. (The future of programming might not look like you expect it to....) This spring, I felt Joy's call again and decided to make time to dive back into the language. Looking back over my notes from fifteen years ago, I'm surprised at some of the neat thoughts I had back then and at some of the code I wrote. Unfortunately, I have forgotten most of what I learned, especially about higher-order programming in Joy. I never reached the level of a Joy master anyway, but I feel like I'm starting from scratch. That's okay. On Thursday, I sat down to write solutions in Joy for a few early homework problems from my Programming Languages course. These problems are intended to help my students learn the basics of functional programming and Racket. I figured they could help me do the same in Joy before I dove deeper, while also reminding me of the ways that programming in Joy diverges stylistically from more traditional functional style. As a bonus, I'd have a few more examples to show my students in class next time around. It didn't take me long to start having fun. I'll talk more in upcoming posts about Joy, this style of programming, and -- I hope -- some of my research. For now, though, I'd like to tell you about one experience I had on my first day without getting into too many details. In one homework problem, we approximate the wind chill index using this formula:

    T' = 35.74 + 0.6215·T - 35.75·V^0.16 + 0.4275·T·V^0.16

where T' is the wind chill index in degrees Fahrenheit, T is the air temperature in degrees Fahrenheit, and V is the wind speed in miles/hour. In Racket, this computation gives student a chance to write a compound expression and, if adventurous, to create a local variable to hold V^0.16. In Joy, we don't pass arguments to functions as in most other languages. Its operators pop their arguments from a common data stack and push their results back on to the stack. Many of Joy's operators manipulate the data stack: creating, rearranging, and deleting various items. For example, the dup operator makes a copy of the item on top of the stack, the swap operator swaps the top two items on the stack, and the rolldown operator moves the top two items on the stack below the third. A solution to the wind-chill problem will expect to find T and V on top of the stack:

T V

After computing V' = V^0.16, the stack looks like this:

    T V'

The formula uses these values twice, so I really need two copies of each:

    T V' T V'

With a little work, I found that this sequence of operations does the trick:

    swap dup rolldown dup rolldown swap

From there, it didn't take long to find a sequence of operators that consumed these four values and left T' on the stack. As I looked back over my solution, I noticed the duplication of dup rolldown in the longer expression shown above and thought about factoring it out. Giving that sub-phrase a name is hard, though, because it isn't all that meaningful on its own. However, the whole phrase is meaningful, and probably useful in a lot of other contexts: it duplicates the top two items on the stack. So I factored the whole phrase out and named it dup2:

    DEFINE dup2 == swap dup rolldown dup rolldown swap.

My first refactoring in Joy! As soon as my fingers typed "dup2", though, my mind recognized it. Surely I had seen it before... So I went looking for "dup2" in Joy's documentation. It is not a primitive operator, but it is defined in the language's initial library, inilib.joy, a prelude that defines syntactic sugar in Joy itself:

    dup2 ==  dupd dup swapd

This definition uses two other stack operators, dupd and swapd, which are themselves defined using the higher-order operator dip. I'll be getting to higher-order operators soon enough, I thought; for now I was happy with my longer but conceptually simpler solution. I was not surprised to find dup2 already defined in Joy. It defines a lot of cool stack operators, the sorts of operations every programmer needs to build more interesting programs in the language. But I was a little disappointed that my creation wasn't new, in the way that only a beginner can be disappointed when he learns that his discovery isn't new. My disappointment was more than offset by the thought that I had recognized an operator that the language's designer thought would be useful. I was already starting to feel like a Joy programmer again. It was a fun day, and a much-needed respite from administrative work. I intend for it to be only the first day of many more days programming with Joy. -----